How do you roll your taxonomy to the enterprise? This may mean technical integration, but also new editorial standards and work processes. The real question is how the taxonomy fits in with overall content creation and management. Deploying the taxonomy means integrating it with existing systems and wrapping tagging into current and updated processes. Another issue is training consumers of information. Is there a way to do that effectively? Is it possible to train external users of your site? This thoughtful session explores these and other issues around “socializing” the taxonomy within the organization to ensure it is an effective tool.

Your taxonomy will not be perfect or complete and will need to be modified based on changing content, user needs, and other practical considerations. Developing a taxonomy incrementally requires measuring how well it is working in order to plan how to modify it. In this session, you will learn qualitative and quantitative taxonomy testing methods including:

• Tagging representative content to see if it works and determining how much content is good enough for validation
• Card-sorting, use-based scenario testing, and focus groups to determine if the taxonomy makes sense to your target audiences and to provide clues about how to fix it
• Benchmarks and metrics to evaluate usability test results, identify coverage gaps, and provide guidance for changes.

Once you’ve gone through the process of building your taxonomy, you may think the hard part is over. Integrating the taxonomy with various technologies — content repositories, search engines, content management systems, portals, or Web sites — is not only just as challenging, but also the point at which the real business value of the taxonomy is realized. In this session, best practices in taxonomy integration and implementation are discussed and examined, illustrated by case studies.

One major taxonomy challenge is how to easily integrate a taxonomy into multiple content management and content delivery environments in a way that is responsive, scalable, and cost-effective. Using an XML solution, Richard Beatch has implemented a solution at Allstate that has one stored taxonomy that can be consumed by all affected applications. The result is vastly improved turnaround times and ease-of-use for taxonomy changes and maintenance.

Using XML to structure and maintain taxonomies facilitates interoperability, integration, and opportunities for reuse. Beginning with a properly structured and tagged taxonomy and its associated schema, this session will demonstrate how XSLT stylesheets can transform the taxonomy into a form that is compatible with any XML-friendly tool or application, including several search engines. It will also show how XML-based taxonomies can be easily integrated and repurposed.

Once you’ve developed a taxonomy, the work has only begun. Keeping it current, meaningful, and accurate over time as business needs evolve is an ongoing effort. Hear best practices and innovative approaches for maintaining your carefully constructed taxonomy. As a result, you will learn how to derive maximum value from your information assets and keep end users coming back for more. A case study from Harvard Business School illustrates these best practices in action.

Faceted navigation for information collections is gaining wide acceptance. However, a considerable impediment to the wider adoption of faceted interfaces is the creation of the faceted hierarchies and the assignments of terms from the hierarchies to the information items. Marti Hearst and her colleague, Emilia Stoica have designed an algorithm called Castanet that semiautomatically
generates hierarchical faceted metadata from textual description of items. Using an existing lexical database (such as WordNet), the algorithm carves out a structure that reflects the contents of the target information collection. Learn how the algorithm has been successfully applied to collections as diverse as recipes, biomedical journal titles, and art history image descriptions. The resulting category hierarchies require only small adjustments to achieve intuitive results with good coverage.

Faceted navigation has been getting a lot of press, but it is important to understand what facets really are, how facets are different from categories, and how to combine facets and categories to create powerful but easy-to-use information access. The right balance of taxonomies and facets combines the best of browsing and advanced search in ways that users will actually use. This session presents the results of a recent project that combined two standard hierarchical taxonomies and then set up a mechanism for dynamically mapping them across two facet dimensions to enable users to zero in on content faster and easier than with just facets or categories.

Is there any method to the madness of social tagging? Will the advantages that David Weinberger advocates in his keynote work inside the firewall? How can folksonomies be leveraged to strengthen traditional taxonomies and make them more dynamic? Hear how three large organizations are harnessing the power of social tagging using the wisdom of the masses to improve search and inform the entire enterprise. See examples of the tools, work flows, and policies that govern their efforts, and find out how to get comfortable in this brave new world.

As illustrated in the prior session, the rapid emergence of social tagging has had a ripple effect in corporate settings due to the potential positive impact on the cost and quality of human-generated metadata. This closing session discusses forward-thinking work on systems that are beginning to merge social tagging with more formal approaches to metadata creation and management. The goal is to allow folksonomies to make taxonomies more responsive to change, while allowing taxonomies to make folksonomies more responsible in the context of information governance.